Three complementary approaches demonstrate new types of organization in rodent, feline and primate auditory cortex, as well as differences in processing between auditory and visual cortex. First, connectional work reveals patterns of thalamocortical and corticocortical input unique to the auditory cortex. Second, physiological studies find multiple, interleaved auditory processing modules relat...

Age-related hearing loss (presbycusis) is characterized by an increased hearing threshold and poor speech understanding in a noisy environment, slowed central processing of acoustic information, and impaired localization of sound sources. Presbycusis seriously affects the older people's quality of life. Particularly, hearing loss in the elderly contributes to social isolation, depression, and l...

Research has demonstrated that a higher level of education is associated with better performance on cognitive tests among middle-aged and elderly people. However, the effects of education on auditory processing skills have not yet been evaluated. Previous demonstrations of sensory-cognitive interactions in the aging process indicate the potential importance of this topic. Therefore, the primary...

The purpose of the current study was to study auditory processing (monaural closure, monaural separation, binaural integration, and binaural separation) skills in subjects withand withoutAlzheimer’s disease. Ten individuals with Alzheimer’s disease and seven individuals without Alzheimer’s disease participated in central auditory processing tasks (degraded speech and dichotic speech). Reduced a...

UNLABELLED Transient congenital visual deprivation affects visual and multisensory processing. In contrast, the extent to which it affects auditory processing has not been investigated systematically. Research in permanently blind individuals has revealed brain reorganization during auditory processing, involving both intramodal and crossmodal plasticity. The present study investigated the effe...

Previous research suggests that children with developmental dyslexia have low-level visual and auditory deficits. The present study further examines these proposed deficits and how they relate to component reading skills. Children with dyslexia and control children were administered measures of visual and auditory processing and a battery of reading tasks, including nonword and irregular-word r...

Two experiments examined the effects of multimodal presentation and stimulus familiarity on auditory and visual processing. In Experiment 1, 10-month-olds were habituated to either an auditory stimulus, a visual stimulus, or an auditory-visual multimodal stimulus. Processing time was assessed during the habituation phase, and discrimination of auditory and visual stimuli was assessed during a s...